Hal asked:
Does anyone know anything about virtualizing an entire WinXP machine and hosting it under Win8.1?
I don't know much about this, but would think it is possible. Some of the gotchas are listed in the links you provided. Here are two: 1. XP has a more hardware dependent configuration than later Windows versions, and it might not work on your virtual machine "hardware". Alternatively you could install a fresh version of XP, and try to migrate your old setup. 2. Microsoft counts the virtual machine as a new installation. If you are decommissioning the old XP machine, Microsoft might let you use the old serial. In my case the old XP machine is home-built, and I installed an OEM version of XP. My understanding is you can't reuse an OEM serial of Windows, but I haven't tried. Why I care is I have my Fractint build environment on an old XP machine. I would love to move the old XP machine into a virtual machine. I might not be able to for the two reasons cited, although I haven't yet tried. The old machine works fine. I have had several experiences of upgrading motherboards with various versions of Windows, and have always managed to overcome both these caveats. Microsoft has a procedure for revalidating an OS serial that is more tedious and annoying than difficult. It involves typing in a lot of numbers. No actual human being is involved. On a related subject, I posted a day or two ago that I had problems installing DOSBox under Fedora (there was some funny keyboard mapping that prevented my typing in any but alphanumeric characters). I just want to report that I tried the same thing with Linux Mint, and in about 5 minutes had DOSBox installed and Fractint running. No problems that I could see.